Naïvely, if someone asked me to write a function that printed a histogram “in ascii”, I would write one that prints an ascii-art histogram, with little stacks of symbols for the height of each bin. If printing to a csv (or other tabular text) format, I would like it not to have a more specific name than “ascii”.
While I’m talking about it, an ascii-art mode for printing would actually be useful sometimes. I’ve used the gnuplot “dumb” terminal to make quick plots through non-X-forwarded ssh connections. Something similar for ROOT was talked about enthusiastically 4 years ago: [url]lsRoot to dump root contents to terminal
Jean-François